I have a young baby so partying ’til midnight for New Years was not exactly on the agenda. This year, to welcome 2008, I created what I hope will become a new ritual. I lay the baby down for her last sleep of 2007 (the year of her birth) and stepped into a piping hot shower. With the new scrubby sponge my sister Kate gave me for Christmas, and the earthy geranium soap I’ve been using since the Christmas before, I began to scrub. I scrubbed from the bottom up – bottoms of tired new mama feet, the flat planes of knee caps achey from bearing the added weight of a new growing human, those wrinkly pink elbows, and the milky curves of my altered torso – changed forever by the ordeal of childbirth – paper thin skin of my flushed chest, strong child wrangling shoulders. As I scrubbed the old skin of 2007 from my body, I thought about how I could better my experience of life in the coming year. I would do my best to make less negative commentary every day, I would improve my honesty in a compassionate manner, I would hope each day to find the strength to forgive those that have hurt me over the years and to open my heart to those who so desire entrance there. I would be more present each moment on earth with my beautiful new daughter and become the person in her life that she will count on for a feeling of emotional grounding – which of course means that I myself will need to work on my own ability to exist peacefully in an uncertain world – not an easy task for me or anyone. I scrubbed and rinsed and scrubbed some more. I felt the heat of the water wash down my back and listened to it swish down the drain into whatever strange adventure water undergoes when it has been used in a shower. I inhaled the steam and exhaled more detritus of the past – whatever I happened to have lodged in there – and with those breaths came a blessing for everyone on earth to have a quiet moment like this, a moment to recognize how each day we are alive is a new chance to scrub ourselves a little bit more into the awake and gracious people we are meant to be.

I hope that you too will find some new rituals in 2008 – something to help you slough off the old dead baggage and open yourself up to those everyday blessings that add up to one expansive blessing called Life.

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